Sugar beet (beet) is a plant useful as a raw material for the extraction of not only sucrose but various functional components (such as raffinose, and betaine). Lately, sugar beet and sugar beet pulp (for example, a fibrous residue after the extraction of sucrose from a sugar beet root) also have been used as raw material for ceramide (glucosylceramide) extraction.
Plant-derived glucosylceramides are a type of sphingoglycolipid which consists of a ceramide with one glucose molecule, and are known to exhibit skin function improving effects (e.g., moisture retention, and anti-atopic effect). This component has attracted interest not only as a raw material of cosmetics but a raw material of food (for oral ingestion).
Some methods have been disclosed that produce a glucosylceramide-containing product from plant raw materials such as cereals and sugar beet (Patent Documents 1 to 4). However, these are all concerned with extraction efficiency from raw material, and merely describe an example of vacuum drying for pulverization. None of these publications describes pulverization by spray drying, or how to make spray drying more efficient.
On the other hand, ceramide extraction from plants involves large amounts of components other than sphingoglycolipids, and the purification and pulverization are not possible effectively. For industrial mass production, spray drying represents the most desirable in pulverization methods. However, it is often difficult for a ceramide-containing liquid to efficiently spray dry because of the nature of the liquid.
Under these circumstances, there is a need in the art to develop a pulverulent ceramide producing method that can produce a pulverulent ceramide through efficient spray-drying pulverization of a ceramide-containing liquid extracted from a plant raw material.